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Fiction: Getting Meta with a wink


Sheila and Marty always seemed, to their mutual friends, an odd pairing. 

Sheila, who in her youth had attended Columbia and Christ Church, Oxford, had nearly completed a doctoral thesis at the latter about Ezra Pound, ("the performance of madness in the Cantos" was how she described its subject to Marty) and she had gathered around her a circle of almost equally erudite friends. 

Then there was Marty. Amongst them he was always getting the references wrong and the pronunciation disastrously so. He knew nothing about Pound except for Pound's fascistic broadcasts. But he was an actual working author (of technical manuals, mostly) and he occasionally did mention that Sheila, for all her talk of writing as Pound understood it, as Art, had never published ... anything anywhere. 

And most places they went, Rowan (Marty's beautiful border collie, whose name had been  selected by his sister for its pure Scottishness) went along .  

[Other stuff in here. Sheila and Marty break up and go their separate ways.]

One day Marty got a call from a friend in publishing circles in New York.

"Uh, hi Marty. This is Joel."  Small talk followed. 

"I'm calling because I thought you might want to know, Sheila may be about to publish something at last."

"I'm not sure I'm anyone you need to call about that." 

"Well ... she is trying to sell a certain story to one of our magazines, and I hear it is circulating at other publishers too." 

Marty, "I'm still not clear ..."

Joel, "Umm, there is a character in it -- not named Marty -- a character who seems to be a thinly veiled version of you. As the protagonist's ex-boyfriend."

"She's writing one of those???"

"Her ex comes off as, well ... delusional.  I just wanted you to know ahead of time because I think she may find a buyer. And I'd hate for you to find out only once it is in print."

Marty sat silent digesting this. Joel continued.

"For example, 'Luther' is so delusional he thinks his dog, who is given some typically Scottish name in the story, winks at him." 

"But Rowan DID wink at me! Often!!"

"Ah, so Luther IS you."  

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